S3NS

S3NS is a joint venture between Thales, its majority shareholder, and Google Cloud. It was set up in 2022, following the strategic partnership the two announced in October 2021, to operate a sovereign cloud as a French law company with datacentres in France.

Why it matters for a PKI

A certificate authority is the trust anchor of everything it signs. Where it runs, who can reach it, and under which jurisdiction, are not infrastructure details: they are part of the security argument you have to make to an auditor, a regulator or a defence customer. For French regulated organisations, that argument increasingly has a name.

PREMI3NS, qualified SecNumCloud 3.2

PREMI3NS is the S3NS public cloud. It runs Google Cloud IaaS, PaaS and CaaS technology and holds SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification from ANSSI, the French cybersecurity agency, which covers 276 requirements across 15 security domains. That qualification is what lets a regulated French organisation use a hyperscaler-derived platform without arguing for a sovereignty exemption, and it covers operation, personnel and jurisdiction, not only technology.

What this unlocks with Evertrust

• Evertrust PKI and CLM can be deployed on PREMI3NS, which places certificate issuance and lifecycle management inside a SecNumCloud-qualified environment rather than beside one.
• An organisation already running on S3NS can deploy the platform in its own tenancy, on infrastructure it has already had qualified, without opening a separate hosting discussion.
• The sovereignty argument is made once. Hosting, operation and jurisdiction are answered by the qualification, so the PKI conversation can stay on policy, protocols and automation.

CRYPT3NS and key control

Alongside the cloud itself, S3NS offers CRYPT3NS, a key management service built by Thales and operated by S3NS. Master keys are held in a Thales Luna Cloud HSM outside Google Cloud and wired to Google Cloud External Key Management, so decrypting data at rest requires the key holder to grant access explicitly. It is the same hardware trust anchor the Thales partnership rests on, applied to cloud data rather than to certificate issuance.